Autism and Occupational Therapy
I very rarely get to speak to just occupational therapists; usually I am speaking to school systems where there are a variety of different backgrounds. It is nice being able to be with here in a roomful of occupational therapists. How many of you currently work in the public schools? How many of you work in a hospital setting? How many of you work more in a home health type setting? Does anyone work in early intervention? How many of you are new to working with children with autism? Do the rest of you have extensive experience with children with autism? It sounds like we have a range of experience and knowledge.
Figure 1. Overview of the 4-part series.
We are doing a four-part series on OccupationalTherapy.com. The first one today is an introduction to autism, really looking at the characteristics of autism. I strongly believe you have to understand the diagnosis in order to help children with autism. You have to understand how their brain is thinking and what is going on in order to know how to set up programs for children with autism. Today that is what we are going to cover. The next presentation is interpreting challenging behavior in individual students with autism. As we know when working with children with autism, there can be many challenging behaviors. This can be really challenging for people. In the next seminar we are going to target and really look at the challenging behavior and interpreting that behavior. In seminar three, which is a two hour seminar, we are going to look at what strategies work best for decreasing challenging behaviors. Seminar two and three are my passion. I am really excited about sharing some really neat, helpful strategies on decreasing challenging behavior. In the last seminar, we are going to talk about some ideas on visual supports and multimedia activities to teach individuals with autism. We all know that a lot of children with autism do better with electronics and things like that, so I am going to give you some ideas on that. Right before I logged on, I got an e-mail on a toilet training potty chair that has an attachment for an iPad. It is really cute. It is like little toilet seat and you attach the iPad right in front of it. I thought that that is genius. We know that iPads are reinforcements for a lot of children with autism. Again, that will be part of the discussion of seminar four.
What Are Autism Spectrum Disorders?
I really like the term called the "hidden disability". What it means is that it is a disability that you cannot see. I think this has its benefits and it has its challenges. It can be easy to include them, because they do not stand out physically. They look the same as any other child. I think that also makes it even more challenging for some families, because it is a brain-based disorder. People cannot see the disability. What they see is just the behaviors and it can lead to a lot of interpretation. I think about families going to Wal-Mart. You may have a child who might be in a wheelchair going to Wal-Mart and families get empathy from others, asking if they can help, etc. But when you have a child with autism, where it is not obvious what the disability is, and they have a meltdown/tantrum on the floor, they do not typically get as much proactive help as a child with physical disability might. I think it has its pros and cons in the fact that it is a hidden disability.
A quote that I love is “if you have seen one child with autism, you have seen one child with autism.” I work a lot in the schools with teachers, and I know it is hard at school. I do not know about other places, but here in Oklahoma, we are trying to keep up and trying to be proactive, but it is hard. The schools are having more and more pressure on them to meet standards and doing that on lower budgets. Working with teachers, they might have had one child with autism in their class, and because they had that one student, they think all students with autism should do the same thing. This is something we have to remember. Students with autism are still individuals with their own sets of strengths and weaknesses.
